


the armies of those I love

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [248]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: California, Chance Meetings, Chinese History - Freeform, Colonialism, F/M, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, Origin Stories, Qing dynasty, title from Walt Whitman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:54:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: The sky was blue, above the ancient world.
Relationships: Elu Thingol | Elwë Singollo/Melian, Lúthien Tinúviel & Melian, Melian & Original Characters
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [248]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	the armies of those I love

_You are as you are to keep me safe. I forgive that._

She was quiet, as a girl. Not afraid (or at least, she had not called it fear _then_ ), but too overawed by the innumerable wonders there were to be cherished, the poverties there were to be spurned, that she kept her mouth shut and her eyes open.

Luthien is different; the child of certainty. She speaks her mind. She laughs and teases. She dances amid poppies that bloom golden rather than blushing red. Melian teaches what histories she thinks will give her daughter life and hope. Luthien knows embroidery, medicinal arts, traditional cookery, fluid figure-writing.

China is only a dream, to Luthien.

She, new-world daughter, does not know of the long-ago days. The palace gardens. The caged nightingales. The square block of jade that was carved (they said) by the wind, in perfectly angled corners, for the Qianlong Emperor’s pleasure.

Of course, the jade and the lie around it were Heshen’s doing.

And of course, Luthien will never know of wicked Heshen, a man whose death Melian’s father did not expect to come soon enough for their salvation. In 1798 (by the Western calendar), Melian and her father sailed away from the kingdom that her physician grandfather had loved and once admired. They had gone in the night. Like her daughter after her, Melian was an only child. Her beautiful mother was dead since Melian’s birth, seven years earlier.

Heshen was brought low the next year. Only his relation to the tenth sister of the new emperor had saved him from a gruesome death by slow slicing. He had been a trusted advisor, irreproachable for a time _because_ of his flagrantly public corruption. The Qianlong Emperor had done nothing to prevent his excesses, his schemes. He had even enjoyed some of them.

Melian’s grandfather had been trusted, too, as court physician, but Heshen hated him. And when her grandfather died—

 _We cannot stay here_ , her father said, as soon as the necessary funeral rights were completed. _He will kill us! He will kill us both._

 _But the Emperor!_ Melian had argued, remembering the slim, ageless face and sharp eyes, not wanting to understand the secret blindness. (She was a child.)

Her father shook his head. He said words that she knew, after, had at last created fear in her. _He is not as he was. He has softened, and a god cannot be soft. He may be king, Melian, but kings are only men with gods' power._

Treason, those words. There was no choice but to flee thereafter, and Melian took a few treasures and all her skills and thoughts, and followed him out of the city, through the country, to the shore.

_I love you, even when you are afraid._

They settled in Manila. The Chinese had been frequent visitors there long before the Spaniards came. Melian befriended women who spoke her language, and learned a good deal, too, from those who did not. Her knowledge of herbs expanded. She had not had the time, nor the maturity, to learn all that her grandfather had had to teach. She remedied that as the years passed.

She was twenty when she met Thingol.

She was twenty when her father died.

Thingol was a rangy, sour-faced sailor, paid to fend off pirates who interfered with the naval frigates carrying bullion along old galleon routes. He hated sailing.

He loved Melian.

He was very, very tall, and very clumsy at dancing. Melian liked both of these things. He would be handsome when he finished growing into his bones. He was quite desperate to speak to her (this would never be true of anyone else in the world, for him), and he tried valiantly to shape his Spanish mouth around Chinese syllables.

He was eighteen.

Two years later, when Thingol had saved enough gold for himself to strike out his own, they sailed out of Manila, bending round the world.

Melian would never forget, what it was to live and grieve, to live and love, at sea.

_Surely, you will never be a man with the voice of a god. Yet, you shape our fate._

In California, Thingol staked his claim among the scattered missions. He had always loved farming; his family in Spain were farmers, though they had died of fever before he went, so young, to sea.

There were no Chinese women in California; there were precious few Chinese men, and they were not treated well. Thingol built a palace, squared by fences, impenetrable. Watchful he was, as both rancher and landlord and husband. Anything but blind.

They were married more than fifteen years before Luthien came to brighten the world of Doriath. Melian did not despair—her father did, and she was not like him—but she had been sorrowful in her heart, thinking that children were denied her.

Luthien speaks many languages, because there are many for her to learn. She runs barefoot through the tall grass. The sky is blue.

The sky was blue, above the ancient world.

_Someday, we shall have to let her go._

Daeron. Rumil. Feanorian. Melkor Bauglir.

Beren, an innocent boy with an open heart and a wounded hand.

_The world will always find us, no matter what we do._

There are many things Melian does not say to her husband.


End file.
